More Articles

The Dispatch E-Edition

All current subscribers have full access to Digital D, which includes the E-Edition and
unlimited premium content on Dispatch.com, BuckeyeXtra.com, BlueJacketsXtra.com and
DispatchPolitics.com.
Subscribe
today!

Enlarge ImageRequest to buy this photoAdam Cairns | DISPATCHOhio Gov. John Kasich, left, and Ohio State University President E. Gordon Gee announced the launch at a news conference yesterday.

Gov. John Kasich made essentially one specific policy proposal in his State of the State speech
in February — to dramatically increase Internet speeds for Ohio’s universities and hospitals.

The mission was formally accomplished yesterday with the “lighting up” of the state’s
refurbished network. The network boosts Internet speeds tenfold for any public school, hospital,
government or business that chooses to team up with a public entity such as a university or
hospital.

The project grew in scope and cost from when Kasich originally proposed it. Costs escalated from
$10 million to $13 million, and the cities of Portsmouth and Wooster were added to the original
slate of locations to get connected to the network. But Kasich’s original plan remained in place:
to take Ohio’s 1,800-mile fiber-optic network and boost Internet speeds from 10 gigabits per second
to 100 gigabits per second. The network is operated by OARnet, a member of the Ohio Board of
Regents Ohio Technology Consortium.

“We think about (mobile communications technology) 4G — this is like 4G times a billion,” Kasich
said. “This is the real thing where we can send amazing amounts of data, videos, file transfers,
the kinds of things that can be used at great distances to communicate back and forth with people
who are engaged in anything from the development of businesses to the practice of medicine. It is
of unlimited potential for the state of Ohio.”

What the state accomplished with Internet speeds will not affect your Web surfing at home.
Kasich and Ohio State University President E. Gordon Gee acknowledged they were stretching the
limits of their expertise in explaining the new network. But here’s one way to grasp it: Ohio’s 1.8
million K-12 students could simultaneously download an e-book, and 300,000 X-rays could be
transmitted within 60 seconds.

For the rollout yesterday, university officials and business leaders from the nine connected
cities were piped in on the new network for a video conference. (Columbus was represented by Gee at
the news conference on Kinnear Road.) They each discussed how their institutions would benefit from
the network and from the business partnerships.

The fields of advanced manufacturing, engineering, medical research and education are expected
to benefit especially from the network.

The upgraded fiber-optic network connects Columbus, Cleveland, Akron, Youngstown, Dayton,
Cincinnati, Wooster, Portsmouth and Athens to northern and southern connection points of Internet2,
a separate system from the Internet that was created in 1996 after universities realized that they
were outgrowing the original system’s capacity.

“What you see today is not competition, it’s collaboration,” Gee said. “You see the points of
Ohio all of a sudden saying, ‘See, we can work together.’ What you also see is tremendous
partnership between business and industry and universities and colleges. And the final thing you
see is that Ohio is really cool.”